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WPCNR NEWS & COMMENT. By John F. Bailey. June 7, 2010 UPDATED June 8,2010. Updated June 9, 2010:
It’s not working is it?
The best laid plans of mice and men have gone incredibly, chillingly wrong.
Now the spin of all time is on…millions are being spent – to save the Gulf Beaches?
No.
To prop up BP’s stock price. To rehab the company as it rewrites the New Black Plague crisis its way.
$60 Million for one television campaign, now a series of full-page ads to paint BP as a good company, victimized by fate.
Here’s an idea for BP’s hideous media people: Could BP’s Tony Hayward jerk up some tears, holding up a rehabbed oil-soaked pelican, releasing the bird in Tampa, maybe? Or maybe Tony and his kids could walk on a Florida Beach and show the beach is clean? Watch for those, coming up.
That would be good…but he might get a spot of oil on his custom shirt.
Could the government of the U.K. come down on BP and bring charges? Where is the British sense of outrage?Where’s the outcry from America’s green people? President Obama of the U.S. seems helpless lest he offend the good old boys in big oil, whom he needs for reelection.
And when Thad Allen, the Coast Guard Commander of the situation gives us the bad news — “there will be oil out there for months to come. This will be well into the fall.”
And when it is painfully obvious today(Monday) not even a third of the oil flow is being “processed” as Admiral Allen put it Saturday – it means that the oil is going to keep on coming.
The spinmasters have been set loose with their cologne, their neat ties and earnest pathological doubletalk to make it right.
The spokespersons, the word merchants, the experts, the think tanks are now out there soothing us with bromides – and I include the administration of the U.S.Government in this group.
We can’t hold the government accountable, can we?
The spinmasters are now busy saying no one is really accountable, that this could not have been foreseen—that accidents happen – and President Obama says today “If we find this is a result of human error—“
What do you mean “if?” Mr. President. This was not a mistake. This is the most reckless a sequence of events in corporate malfeasance since the building of the Titanic.
“If it was a result of human error?”
A congressional committee two weeks ago heard BP and Transocean people admit that BP overrode Transocean’s concerns about building pressure in the well and said go ahead we want to open that well.
Human error? They ignored warning signs. They blew off the concerns and the well blew up. That’s what happened. They said that’s what happened. Have we forgotten that?
This is as big a disaster as they come. Not in loss of life (though eleven died). But in the loss of a way of life for decades.
Now that the damage is really out of control, never-ending, the media with the blessed exception of the great Anderson Cooper, the battle has turned to getting America to accept BP as a good, cuddly giant corporate international cartel who cares. That campaign has begun.
I wrote this column on Monday. As of Tuesday morning, The Today Show prior to showing an interview with the President, did not even update the Gulf “oil flow” numbers at 7 A.M. before introducing the President. How can you not? It is already being downplayed.
In that interview on TODAY, the President actually said the ruined marshes may come back in 3 years.
On “Morning Joe,” BP ran a commercial with Mr. Hayward depicting workers on a beach, flotillas and Mr. Hayward reading off a teleprompter.
Media rehab has begun.
And on Wednesday, on Today, they have the BP Chief Operating Officer Doug Suttles on after he tells the Associated Press the oil will be down to “a trickle” by next Monday, and after BP issued a statement contradicting that. Meredith Viera asks him about discrepancies — but fails to ask him the big question, what his definition of “a trickle” is. How can you not ask that? He also denied the existence of an underwater plume by saying BP had still not found “significant” quantities of underwater oil. Of course, he did not define “significant.”
In a few weeks, you will be seeing profiles of hard-working BP experts, interviews of beach-cleaners, and shots of pelicans being let loose in Tampa…one webbed foot ahead of the oil that is seeking out every living thing in the Gulf like an inexorable glob of doom.
We are not cleaning up the spill. It will never be cleaned up in our lifetime.
You will see trot-outs of “experts” saying how the sea has already begun to cleanse itself.. watch.
We are now battling to shape American minds that this was all a freak of nature and a “bad break” for BP, and perhaps an oil well too big to handle—the gusher of all gushers – I heard a report that one BP guy on the rig state they had no idea how powerful this well was. Read: we had no idea. (BP should pay me $1 Million for that spin).
A Place for the Hidden Persuaders
There is a special place in eternity for the people that create the statements, the pretty words, the persuasive commentaries, and jowly sanctimonious statements of booming authority to make their employers, their government, their industry look better than they are and soften the public attitude towards their companies. Those “Hidden Persuaders” as Vance Packard would call them – who are being called on now to win back sympathy from the public. To win the public’s forgiveness and absolution for this abomination of technical conceit.
BP and the rest of The Big Oilers are now concerned not with Mr.Pelican, or Mr. and Mrs. Louisiana, Alabama, Mississsippi or Florida. Their mission now is to keep the magic gateway to continued illicit obscene profit open. They need “forgiveness,” “absolution.”
When these people, the spokespersons, the barristers, the press release writers, the politician speech writers die there is a place for them.
There is a special place in Dante’s Inferno – The Vestibule – where the immortal poet first sees the countless souls from all of the millennia before – shut out of Hell, put it
“The sighs, groans and laments at first weren so loud,
Resounding through starless air, I began to weep:
Strange languages, horrible screams, words imbued
Of error, cried: “Master, what is this I hear?
What people are these, whom pain has overcome?”
He: “This is the sorrowful state of souls unsure,
I could not help but think as America watches the Gulf of Mexico in its Black Plague irony with all the brains and knowledge of the engineers, the Coast Guard, and the scientists unable to stop the black death, that the public relations persons who put out the full page BP ad in the New York Times, will someday join this stream of
those who chose “a blind life,” in Dante’s immortal Hell.
This advertisement appearing in The Times Monday, is a classic in pornographic propaganda, sanctimonious hand-wringing and a testimony to the incompetence of our time and, in this reporter’s opinion, is pure evil.
How many rationalizations are there in this insulting ad for incompetence on a grand scale, aided and abetted by billions, with the preposterous earnest headline:
“We will get it done.
We will make this right.”
Every sentence of this ad should be torn apart and rejected by media companies everywhere asked to run it.
The New York Times, that cosmo-sipping, politically correct, upholder of all that is good for the upper class, the ultimate “ecological” crusader, should have rejected the advertisement, but they made big time money off it, so they ran it. Shame on them.
If it makes money, it’s good. That’s our American attitude today.
Let’s take this BP ad sentence by sentence. Flacks in training, facilatators of the feckless, listen up, it is a masterpiece of propaganda, good to wipe off a pelican with.
“The Gulf oil spill is a tragedy that never should have happened.”
Webster’s defines tragedy as “a serious play with an unhappy ending,” and 2.”a very sad and tragic event; disaster, fatal.”
Tragedy (it rolls off the tongue with reference and pathos, soft, touchy-feely and sensitive) is also a soft sympathetic word – better than “outrage,” for example, better than “ecological Armageddon,” better than “Black Death,” for example….and people reading it can swallow it more easily as something that will be forgotten as time goes by. Because, let’s face it. Tragedies happen, the implication is, no one is at fault, no one did a tragedy deliberately.
“Tragedy” implies it will go away, and the unaffected person can subconciously swallow the whole Gulf gaff as something that could not be foreseen or avoided.
Every wave sloshing in tells you that, doesn’t it? It’s just so sad.
But the BP propagandists – worthy of Josef Goebbels(Adolf Hitler’s publicist) — are just getting warmed up:
“And while we were deeply disappointed that the recent “top kill”b operation was unsuccessful, we were also prepared. The best engineers in the world are now working around the clock to contain and collect most of the leak.”
Prepared, is this ad serious?
The very facts that this happened and has lasted as long as it has cries out, saying that they were not prepared.
What they have done is to try and do again what they attempted to do the previous week: Cap the well.
It did not work 9 days ago, and the same thing is happening 9 days later. If they get up to 75% “processing” then they can say they are containing and collecting most of the leak. That paragraph softpedals and sugarcoats what really has happened. And collecting? What one tarball at a time?
“BP will continue to take full responsibility for the spill.”
As CNN’s Anderson Cooper has repeatedly shown on his telecasts all last week the responsibility BP has shown so far is slow in coming and not at all responsible enough.
Not enough workers on the beaches.
Not enough booms. Using the alleged wrong dispersant, not enough reimbursing fisherman timely enough, not replacing booms, and denying existence of the underwater plume, and not having any precise way of measuring the rate of oil leakage that has credibility, and finally understating the acreage of shoreline affected thus far.
Prepared?
They may been prepared, but they were not ready.
And really neither was the U.S. Government ready, which despite the President’s forthright denials, they were not. Eating shrimp on the beach and saying it does not make it so. He let BP handle it.
Precious time gone.
And speaking of not ready–it was reported on Morning Joe Tuesday that BP has only one ship capturing oil and therefore could not ramp up capacity. They are bringing a ship from the North Sea that may take two weeks to get here. How LONG has the oil been spilling? 50 days or so. Talk about not being ready and not planning! Come on.
The Advertisement shamelessy brags and goes on:
“We have organized the largest environmental response in this country’s history. More than three million feet of boom(571 miles), 30 planes and over 1,300 boats are working to protect the shoreline. When oil reaches the shore, thousands of people are ready to clean it up.”
Thousands? As Anderson Cooper showed us last week with his live shots of the Louisiana beaches…there were not thousands, and this is 6 weeks after the spill. It is too late. In Florida, a photograph showed children walking on beaches and their feet becoming coated with oil. Thousands?
WPCNR was doing a little math Monday afternoon. My purely amateur analysis suggests that that the 571 miles of boom is not enough for a coast line that measures from the Louisiana western border to the Florida Straits that WPCNR estimates is 900 miles…and though the 571 Miles is enough for one line of boom from Louisiana to the Florida panhandle just be looking at a map…you need double that for all the barrier islands in Louisiana alone, etc. They do not have anywhere close enough booms, after six weeks and they are not replenishing them, hence not working.. They have to be replaced.
And, let us not let the government and the Coast Guard off the hook. We see the Coast Guard is not prepared to handle big time oil spills either, is it? Nor the Navy for that matter. Where are those defense contractors when you need them? Where are the flotillas of booms ready to go?
And what about FEMA? Less press conferences more clean-up,more booms faster next time.
The President was not in charge. They’re still using the more toxic dispersant aren’t they? He has continued to let them throw the toxic dispersant in the water.
This is a disasterous response by both parties, BP and BG (Big Government). They did not even enlist the fishermen of Louisiana who were pleading to go into the marsh and the Gulf until way late.
BP just did not want us to see how bad it was.
The BP propaganda machine continues in the Times ad Monday:
“Thirty teams of specialists are combing the shore along with US Fish and Wildlife, NOAA and Louisiana Wildlife and Fisheries. If wildlife is affected, rescue stations have been set up to take care of them. Experts have been flown in from around the country. And BP has dedicated $500 million to watch over the long-term impact on marine life and shoreline.”
How many specialists? It takes one person per bird. There are a lot of birds and more are coming in every day. They have had to know there were going to be oil-coated birds for six weeks…now the birds are proliferating and we have no idea of the numbers of birds and whether they can all be handled.
Facts are really missing here in this ad. There is no way to tell if this is an adequate number.
But then BP has not dealt in facts from the beginning.
They are airlifting the birds to Tampa. Perhaps they should airlift them West to Corpus Christi. Downwind and downcurrent of the spill, because that oil is headed to Tampa.
Perhaps next time there’s a spill you might think about removing the birds before they get coated with oil…easier to catch them than clean them. And what are the planes doing, dumping dispersant probably.
The ad wraps up this way:
“We will honor all legitimate claims. We will continue working for as long as ittakes. All our efforts will not come at any cost to taxpayers.”
Who is writing this stuff? Joseph Delfino and the Common Council of White Plains?
How can any one know that?
The taxpayers of the shore of Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi and the Florida Panhandle are about to be victimized at tremendous cost to the state and waters they love, their livelihoods, their hope.
These bromides do not make it better, BP-ers. Trust me.
“We understand that it is our responsibility to keep you informed. And do everything we can so this never happens again.”
We will get this done. We will make this right.”
Make this right.??????
You can never make this right.
Because it was never right in the first place.
Well, inform us. Tell us more precisely how big this spill is. You don’t know? Come on this I believe is an outright lie. You calculate your barrels a day output all right. It is a ridiculous statement at this time.
No matter how much money BP throws in, it will not buy back the Gulf as it was.
Tell us what can be done about the underwater plume your chairman denied existed. Tell us how long this will take to make it right.
These are the best engineers in the world. They may be. But they may also be the most careless. The persons who told Transocean to go-ahead…well that was reckless.
Tell us what happens if the two new wells being drilled don’t work.
Meanwhile, this company, and the other big oilers want to be able to keep drilling these offshore wells off that Atlantic Coast.
Well – BP should not be allowed to drill another well or operate these wells that they own in the United States. The President should nationalize the Alaska oil field BP runs as a safety risk. All their leases should be declared null and void.
This is a crisis for the oil industry they have to persuade everyone that this can’t happen again.
The silver tongues sugarcoating this disaster in irresponsible ads pandering to every decent person’s sense of forgiveness deserve the Vestibule, because they have no soul, no sense of decency. And deep in the night, they cannot sleep.
You know what BP really stands for, don’t you?
Bunk Petroleum
It is fitting to read Dante’s full description of why the inhabitants of the Vestibule are there in his Inferno.
Don’t you seem to recognize the apologists, the experts, the politicians, the spinmasters for oil in Dante’s description?:
“The sighs, groans and laments at first weren’t so loud,
Resounding through starless air, I began to weep:
Strange languages, horrible screams, words imbued
Of error, cried: “Master, what is this I hear?
What people are these, whom pain has overcome?”
He: “This is the sorrowful state of souls unsure,
Whose lives earned neither honor nor bad fame.
And they are mingled with angels of that base sort
Who, neither rebellious to God nor faithful to Him,
Chose neither side, but kept themselves apart –
Now Heaven expels them, not to mar its splendor,
And Hell rejects them, lest the wicked of heart
They have no hope of death, but a blind life.
So abject, they envy any other fate.
To all memory of them, the world is deaf.
Mercy and justice disdain them Let us not
Speak of them: look and pass on.” I looked again:
A whirling banner sped at such a rate.
I seemed it might never stop; behind it a train
Of souls, so long that I would not have thought
Death had undone so many.When more than one
I recognized had passed, I beheld the shade
Of him who made the Great Refusal and His enemies-
Hapless ones never alive, their bare skin galled
